Unshed Tears
by griffon
Summary: Inside OoTP Chapter 28: A jar of dead cockroaches flies after Harry! Snape's thoughts on the spying of the Boy-who-Lived into a very private memory.


Unshed Tears

  
  
'Get out, get out, I don't want to see you in this office ever again!'   


And as Harry hurteled towards the door, Snape snatched the first thing he'd get hold of - a jar of dead cockroaches. It exploded over that silly boy's head only instants before he wrenched the door open.   
  
Severus gave a deep sigh, when he sank into his chair behind his table.   
  
Why had it always to be like this with Harry?   
  
Would this boy never ever learn?   
  
Potter was reckless and thoughtless and in his particular ways an arrogant, little know-it-all: He'd make up his mind and decide what was right and wrong without thinking twice or even allowing himself for some mature reflection.   
  
He'd run wild pushed along his quest to save the world because it 'seemed to him that......'.   
  
He was fool enough to wear his heart proudly on his sleeve.............   
  
Even now at 15, he was a child and nothing more and Severus felt a sourge of dispair, since the doom of the Dark Lord lay in the hands of this child. If they wanted to ridden their world of the Dark One, he'd have to be defeated by the hands of Harry Potter.   
  
'Damn the prophecy!' 

  
  


Snape moaned into the black sleeves of his billowing robes. He felt the light black wool fabric absorbing the stream of tears that ran from his eyes. It had been ages since he had allowed himself for the last time to cry!   
  
Now with Harry proving once again to Albus and him that he was still neither ready nor prepared to enter the game of chess and to do his duty, all these unshed tears of the last years of his life decided to run free together with those he let go, because he felt that he'd utterly failed.   
  
There was no way to get some sense into Harry!   
  
He was not even sensible enough to respect privacy and to consider the fact, that if Snape dispatched certain of his memories into a Pensiève, he may have good reasons to do so.   
  
Fortunately the boy had only come across that blasted incident, where his father -holy James Potter- had made himself a fool in front of the whole school!   
  
Turning against an isolate victim, playing a bastards game not even worthy of a brainless five years old, discrediting himself -for James had a brilliant mind when it came to learn his stuff for school and to pass exams top of his class - by demonstrating that he had knowledge, but no maturity and probably........no humanity..... 

  


Severus had disposed of this particular memory not because of his own dignity! Not even the fact to hang upside down from a tree in his underwear could take his dignity away. It did not depend upon how others saw him. It depended solely on how he himself looked each morning into a mirror and into his own eyes.   
  
But Harry had this high opinion of his 'heroic' father and there perhaps an aim for what he himself should be. It would have been good if the boy would have worked along with them, telling himself that he'd had to try harder if he wanted to raise to his own opinion of his hero father.   
  
Now there was even more turmoil in this tormented child's soul.   
  
Blast Harry's curiosity and recklessness once more.   
  
Severus lifted his face from the wool fabric and fumbled a hankerchief from his pocket to clean the remaining tears from his eyes.   
  
Fortunately Harry had not looked further into the Pensiève: The life and ways of a spy were never pretty!   
  
Blood and horror and death had been there and ....memories of fear. Self-loathing for what he had to do to keep his cover inside the Death Eaters, to be recognized by the Dark Lord as one of them...   
  
There had also been pride in the Pensiève, pride about the trust of one Albus Dumbledore, when he'd come to a student's room at Oxford's Flamel College one thousands of years ago and asked a younger Severus Snape if he'd accept a very peculiar and dangerous job, because he had it all to make this job a sucess!   
  
Severus had been hardly nineteen then. He'd never ever thought of doing anything else but some research work in a Potions Lab and perhaps launching himself into a scientific quest of knowledge.   
  
He'd never thought himself brave or daring or reckless or courageous. He'd been a silent child, a silent and remote boy, a silent and thoughtful young adult.

  
And Albus had told him there and then in his college room that it was exactly these traits of character that made him so attractive to the Order of the Phenix and for this very peciuliar job to try and infiltrate the cercle of Lord Voldemort's followers and to.........survive!   
  
The Potions Master gave another deep sigh: Survived he had and even made his way back into the Dark Lord's den and Inner Circle almost unscathed.   
  
But would young Harry Potter who was so crucial to bring this all to an end survive even the next few weeks so that one day in the future he might give those who were by now struggeling for more then fifteen years against the incarnation of evil a nimble chance to return to a normal existence and some kind of a life?


End file.
